A room of one’s own becomes a preferred way of living

“You need an apartment alone even if it’s over a garage,” declared Helen Gurley Brown in her 1962 best seller, “Sex and the Single Girl”. To Brown, who went on to edit Cosmopolitan magazine, the benefits of solo living were innumerable: it afforded the space to cultivate the self, furnish the mind, work late and indulge in sexual experimentation.